“Starless” has made me weep

07.29.2006 permalink Music We are often cursed with liking a piece of music which leaves our friends and lovers cold and underwhelmed. I've often thought that the song “Starless” off of King Crimson's Red album was a pinnacle of rock music. It is one of the few songs that I can listen to over and over and over…. “Starless” has often put me into that “eye of the hurricane” state that you access when listening to really intense music and usually leaves me breathless and wanting for more.

But we have the web which can be used to hunt down people who also like what we like. There's comfort in collective solipsism :-) I found the following two “reviews” by Stephanie Sollow and Eric Tamm respectively to be more than adequate validation for my beliefs regarding “Starless.”

Here's an excerpt from Stephanie Sollow: ”You are being wound tighter and tighter and the scale is being slowly climbed, higher and higher you go…and then off into another direction, though tighter still till we explode into a flurry of saxophone notes. We are now scattershot, pieces of the self here, there and everywhere - chaos ensues. Oh, this goes through so many different tempos and moods, I'm not really going to try visualize them all. But, my god, this is some damn terrific stuff. What was I thinking in not playing this often?”

And this one from Eric Tamm: ”“Starless” is more than all that, though: in my opinion it is simply the best composition King Crimson ever committed to record. It is also the only King Crimson piece that has ever made me weep - those tears that tend to issue out of a direct confrontation with what we feebly call “artistic greatness” but is really a portentous and rarely glimpsed secret locked away at the heart of human experience.” Access: Public Type: Blog Add Comment posted by Anand